Get Windows Vista Paint Running Perfectly on Windows 7 and Windows 8

06 Jul 2011

If you're a pixel artist, you know that the new Windows 7 paint is quite horrendous. It's got awful, awful anti-aliasing on any of the shapes that you might use (including the line tool) which is extremely terrible for any pixel artist, as you're supposed to be the one anti-aliasing anything. Plus, the whole "ribbon" update to the interface is just annoying. I’m sure there’s even more that’s bad, but I’m not a pixel artist so I wouldn’t know. However, I have a solution for any of you pixel artists out there! It’s a bit technical, and you have to be careful as you’re mussing around with system files, but as long as you follow this guide exactly, you’ll be fine.

Quick tip: To paste into a command prompt you cannot use a keyboard shortcut. Right click anywhere in the command prompt to have a menu pop up with the option!

First, you need to take ownership of a couple of files. To do that, open up an administrator command prompt by searching “cmd” from the start menu and pressing ctrl+shift+enter to open it up. Once you’re there, type this out:

takeown /f C:\Windows\System32\en-US\mspaint.exe.mui

After you’re done typing that and pressing enter, type this in, but make sure to replace “username” in the code with your username.

cacls C:\Windows\System32\en-US\mspaint.exe.mui /G username:F

Now that we have that done, we’re going to do the same for another file.

takeown /f C:\Windows\System32\mspaint.exe

cacls C:\Windows\System32\mspaint.exe /G username:F

Now all you have to do is grab the two files that you downloaded earlier and put them in their respective locations. Put the mspaint.exe in C:\Windows\System32\ (just drag it there and click replace), and the mspaint.exe.mui in C:\Windows\System32\en-US\

Alrighty, I hope that helped you out! If you have any questions, just comment below and I’d be glad to help.

Update for those with a 64-bit operating system

Several comments have been left asking why this wasn't working properly on their machine, and I figured it out! Your machines are most likely using the 64-bit version of Windows 7, which means there is two extra files you need to swap.

Open up CMD again by pressing Ctrl + Shift + Enter for administrator rights. Then, issue all of these commands.